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Technology Insights, Tutorials and Course Development

Presenting Vendor Preview: Gigamon

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Gigamon is one of those companies that’s been to the Networking Field Day rodeo. In fact they go all the way back to Networking Field Day 2, and believe it or not, I was a delegate for that one as well. I haven’t covered them extensively here but let me provide a high level introduction and share what I’ m looking forward to at NFD15.

Gigamon Overview

At a very high level Gigamon is a visiblity company. What I mean by that is that they are a network tap vendor and their solution has some juice. In fact, they have enough juice that they’ve been around for quite a long time. I can remember the presentation back at NFD2 when I asked why I couldn’t just use a monitor session command? Well I can, but switches have limitations and Gigamon overcomes them.
But back to the actual Gigamon overview. Gigamons products play in several different areas. They have Visibility Nodes, Network Taps, Orchestration and Intelligence products. Covering each of these products and their corresponding solutions would take way to long. So I’ll leave it at this, they make stuff, it pretty good quality, and lots of people like them. With that said, what am I expecting to hear at NFD15?

What do I expect to hear at NFD15?

If I were a betting man, which I am not, I would bet that we will be hearing about Visibility into SSL/TLS traffic.

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Browsing their website what really interests me is the GigaSECURE solution which is a security delivery platform solution. It could be that what GigaSECURE can deliver is visibility into SSL/TLS traffic. I guess we will just have to see.

Join The Fun!

You can join the fun live at techfieldday. Feel free to tweet me any questions you have and Ill make sure I ask them!

Presenting Vendor Preview: PNDA

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This week Ill be attending Networking Field Day 15 and amongst the list of presenting sponsors is PNDA. PNDA is another vendor that I am not too familiar with since I don’t
deal a whole lot with big data. Another unique feature of PNDA is that they are an open source Linux Foundation collaborative project. Let’s talk about what they do.

PNDA overview

PNDA has a pretty detailed overview page. At a very high level PNDA is a scalable analytics platform that offers an innovative approach to collecting, processing and analyzing big data. PNDA combines several open
source technologies to create their solution. According to the about page, PNDA decouples the data sources from the data consumers and the makes the data available to any application for processing. My initial thoughts is that something like this makes
sense, if I understand it correctly. Take all the data sources, send them to one place, and then let different applications access the data as the need to. I think this is a better approach than to span data to multiple locations for different applications
to access.

What I’m looking for.

I don’t have a lot of expectations going into this presentation. I’m excited to learn some of the details on what PNDA does, and how they compare to something like nysana who presented at NFD12.

Follow Along

It’s easy to follow a Field Day. Simple point your browser to http://techfieldday.com and when the live stream starts you can watch it there. Here’s our schedule:

Date Time Preseting:
Wednesday, Apr 5 13:00 – 15:00 IP Infusion
Wednesday, Apr 5 15:30 – 16:30 PNDA
Thursday, Apr 6 8:30 – 12:30 VMware
Thursday, Apr 6 13:00 – 15:00 TELoIP
Thursday, Apr 6 13:30 – 14:30 Gestalt IT Roundtable Podcast Recording
Friday, Apr 7 8:00 – 10:00 Gigamon
Friday, Apr 7 10:30 – 11:30 Gestalt IT Roundtable Podcast Recording

Please note that some portions of the schedule may not be streamed live. I have no control over that.

If you’d like to ask a questions please feel free to tweet me and I’ll make sure it gets asked.

Presenting Vendor Preview: IP Infusion

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IP Infusion is one of those companies that I know I’ve heard of but have had no experience with. Then I started doing to research and found out that I’ve probably crossed paths with them in some way before. Before I get to how I know that, let me introduce you to the company.

About IP Infusion

IP Infusion offers network operating systems for both physical and virtual environments. These operating systems are known as OcNOS™ and VirNOS™ and are powered by ZebOS®. OcNOS is designed to operation on Open Compute hardware and VirNOS is an NFV-based software platform. The company has been around for over 15 years and was founded in 1999 by Kunihiro Ishiguro and Yoshinari Yoshikawa. The company was founded with the purpose of providing hardware-independent network software for IPv4 and IPv6 and from what I can tell this is accomplished with ZebOS. The founder of the company is the developer of Zebra which is a routing software package that is open source. ZebOS is the commercial version of this software. Again from what I can tell ZebOS has extensive support for MPLS.

How have I crossed paths with them before?

So after learning a bit more about what IP Infusion does and about ZebOS, it seems I may have used some form of their product in the past. First off, Citrix NetScaler appears to be using ZebOS, as well as F5 and Tail-F. I guess you learn something every day!

What Am I Interested In Learning at NFD15?

I suppose I’m interested in learning a bit more about how they are delivering a better solution than others. The fact that other networking companies are using their routing software to deliver their solutions leads me to wonder why they would compete in that area rather than getting their software running in more vendor products. Maybe I’m missing something here, so I suppose I’ll be educated at NFD15.

Follow Along!

Want to follow along? You can by tuning into the live stream. During NFD15 you can follow along by visiting http://techfieldday.com. Feel free to tweet me any questions you’d like to have answered.

Cisco Certifications: Still worth the effort?

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I’ve had several conversations with students from the past and colleagues of today on the validity and impact of Cisco certifications. I can recall back in my early days of networking when the Cisco certification was the grand puba of any cert you could get. If you were a CCIE people treated you like you were a celebrity. I think that hype is what got me really engaged with the Cisco certification program. But as time has gone by there’s been a big shift in how networking is approached. And it’s that shift that’s caused many to question whether they should pursue Cisco certifications at this time.

While I dont plan on dragging this out I’ll simply say this. If you think that you’re career can ride on getting Cisco certs, you’re probably correct. But you’ll be behind the curve and working on equipment and operating systems that are a bit behind, unless you work for a very progressive organization. The majority of organizations that use Cisco gear are being deployed based on what certified people have worked up, often designs that are several years old. Certifications don’t keep up with todays network capabilities.

I’m not going to attempt to tell you what certifications or learning paths to pursue at this time. I think much of those decisions should examine multiple factors and I dont have all those variables at this time. What I will say is that a networking professional needs to understand how to read and write scripts in some of the common languages used today. This is a skill that I am personally giving extra attention to as I know its an area that I lack in. Too, todays networker should be focused on business goals and viable vendor solutions, rather than being locked into a specific vendor because you sport their digits on your email signature.

Be versatile. Be willing to learn. Be willing to fail. The skills you learn doing that will last a career, even if vendors come and go.